Picture This

Whatever Happened to Captain Snaps?

It took three months, four phone messages and countless mutual friends hassling Joe Stevens to get an interview with him, even though he lives three blocks from me in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To pin him down, I had to find him in person. The day after Thanksgiving, my kid and I were strolling to Caffe Kilim and finally found Stevens sitting on a bench out front. White-haired, sharp-eyed, wearing a black cap and dark clothes, he sat with nimble fingers clutching a coffee cup and yakked with the other patrons. He looked like a character, but not the kind that stands out.

When I introduced myself, he gave me an affable grin. He was willing to talk: before, he told me, he didn't want to do press because he had nothing to promote. But this time, he had a show going up at the Press Room, so sure, let's set a time.

Stevens photographs rock stars. He's also shot news, for underground and radical papers in the 1960s and 70s, and he used to make Super8 films while he was road managing a world tour for Miriam Makeba. But since the mid-60s, his main gig has been rock-- and his photos are jawdropping. Johnny Cash warming up in his dressing room at Carnegie Hall. Paul McCartney in the early 70s on a bad hair day. John Lennon in his granny glasses smiling from a throng at a street rally. Robert Plant on stage and off, golden curls of hair cascading around a hard face. He caught musicians at their peaks and he caught them when they were just getting started: he's got early pix of Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits, in scruffy, unfamiliar beards, or Chaka Khan in a disco outfit in the 70s. Who knew her mouth looked that big? And I said he's a rock photographer, but he shot rappers too, right when that kicked off: Grandmaster Flash. Kurtis Blow. He also caught the first and last Sex Pistols gig. He also shot Woodstock.

Stevens understands how us locals react to these photos, and to his stories. He calls himself a "bigshot photographer," but he doesn't act like you should be impressed. And some people in Portsmouth don't buy his stories. They're too good to be true. Really Joe, you met the Pet Shop Boys when they were still shopping a demo around New York? But the facts add up. That's his consultant credit on Sid & Nancy , which he earned by sharing his first-hand experiences with Sid Vicious. Those are his bylines in the NME and elsewhere-- although sometimes he went under the name "Captain Snaps." And oh yeah, he still has all the negatives.

As the rock writer Chris Salewicz, his friend and collaborator, puts it: "He's undoubtedly one of the very greatest of all rock and roll photographers. But I suspect he's somewhat underrated. Which might be his own fault, of course."

/ / /

Caption: Prince in New York City, 1981 (c) 2007 Joe Stevens

Unlike many of the folkies who found their way to Greenwich Village in the early 60s, Joe Stevens was a native New Yorker. He was born in 1938; his mom raised him all over Queens, and "we lived in basements," Stevens recalls. "She was a waitress, she raised me on tips." His dad, who divorced his mom when Joe was five, was an art assessor. Stevens saw his dad on weekends, and "we'd walk around Manhattan to the tune of 100 blocks each trip, each Sunday. He'd point out stuff on each streetcorner. There'd be a gargoyle sticking out of the corner of the building with this big Satanic face, and he'd tell me all about how he'd gone to Paris, and he'd tell me about the Louvre...he turned me onto art, he turned me onto using my eyes."

Today Joe says that if he hadn't gotten into the music business, he would have wound up dead or in Attica, like the other kids in his neighborhood. Instead, he found jobs at cafés in the Village, and fell in with the burgeoning folk scene. He knew Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, and Fred Neil-- and in fact, he flew to Florida with Neil, "and we founded the music scene in Coconut Grove." And he kept skipping town to travel around the country-- like in the mid-60s, when he and his first wife married in Paris, Illinois, spent a winter in Vail, Colorado, and wound up in Los Angeles.

Stevens fell in with the scene in L.A., hanging around with the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, and Sonny and Cher-- and not hanging around with his wife. As he told me matter-of-factly: "I got involved in all of that. And [my wife] didn't care for hanging out in recording studios and bars, and nightclubs, and soon I vanished. The hubby was gone. I was having a great time, being in California."

When the Byrds hit the charts with "Mr. Tambourine Man", they gave Stevens a proposition: They needed a road manager, and after his time in clubs and show business, he seemed like a guy who could wave around contracts, pick up checks and make sure the sound was good. That led next to a road manager gig with the Lovin' Spoonful, and after they broke up, with international pop star Miriam Makeba-- who took him all over the world, to Asia and Latin America, hotel openings in Mexico, and the palace of Haile Selassie.

But by the late 60s, Stevens had also taken up photography. It started as a hobby, carrying a camera with him to shows-- like when Mississippi John Hurt gave him a backstage pass for a Carnegie Hall concert, and he snapped pictures of Muddy Waters and Johnny Cash on-stage and in their dressing rooms. But thanks to rock photographer Henry Diltz, he came to realize photography was a better gig than management.

Stevens hired Diltz as a tour photographer, and "sometimes we'd room together. And I'd see how he lived. He'd take his little film cassettes, and he'd write '400 ASA' on them, put them on the counter, go downstairs, and get laid. He'd get hammered and charge everything, and I knew what he was making because I was cutting his check. I said, 'Wow, that's a good gig!' I had all the headaches [as road manager], people getting busted, girlfriends, diseases...I had to worry about all that stuff. And he'd just sort of say, 'I hope there's some nice girls downstairs.'"

But Phil Ochs gave him the final push. As he recalls, they were hanging out at his West Village apartment, maybe in 1967, maybe listening to Sgt. Pepper's , and eating pasta, and smoking pot they bought from the bodega across the street. They were watching films Stevens had shot on the road with Makeba, Super8 movies of jungles, "and subways, and caves, and markets from around the world."

Ochs "took a joint, started hitting on my girlfriend, and then he blurted out, 'Why don't you get yourself a job on a newspaper? You've got an eye for news. You're a newspaper guy. You're a photojournalist.'...[So] that's what I did."

And so he quit Makeba's tour, and started as a photojournalist with the underground press. He was the staff photographer for the East Village Other in New York, who put him on the Chicago 8 trials, the Days of Rage, marches, tear gassings, and Black Panther rallies. News was his focus, but his big break came when he shot Woodstock. The road manager of the Incredible String Band hooked him up with a photo pass and a ride upstate, and once he got there, Stevens stayed in the pit shooting roll after roll of film. One of his photos landed in the Woodstock issue of Life -- the preeminent magazine of its day for photography.

Not that he spent all his time working. During the Grateful Dead's set, "this young lady and I snuck off to the woods. And on the way into a secluded spot, there were hippies in the grass, in the weeds, screwing. And I remember walking past this one couple, and the girl on the bottom, a hippie girl, she looks up to me and says, 'Hey man!' [and flashes a peace sign]. That would have been the greatest photograph from Woodstock."

But his career in rock photography took off when he signed up with the New Musical Express , in London. And he wound up in London almost by accident. His girlfriend at the time got a new credit card and bought them both plane tickets to London. But she only got him a one-way ticket, so he wound up stranded and looking for work. He hooked up with The International Times , "another radical nasty left-wing paper," and because of his sketchy visa status, he worked under a pseudonym, Captain Snaps.

On a freelance assignment for the British magazine Cream , he met Charles Shaar Murray. To Murray and some of the other younger rock writers, Stevens was an established bigshot, a somewhat older man who had actually been at Woodstock. Murray recalls his "handlebar moustache, henna'd hair, and a leather jacket...He was a bit of an elder statesman, I was very much a new kid in town."

They worked together for a few papers around the underground press, and then a bigger gig came up. Stevens recalls: "He said, 'Come on, we're going to go take over a kick-ass weekly.' I said, 'What do you mean take it over? Tear gas it?' 'No no no, we're going to go there and change it forever, and turn it into the best weekly paper.' We did. It was the New Musical Express ."

Murray recalls: "I'd got an opportunity to do some work for the NME , which was a very mainstream, corporately published rock weekly that had gotten into sales difficulties, and had decided on a radical makeover." The underground press was dying out anyway, so Murray and Nick Kent made the leap-- and they brought Stevens and Pennie Smith as their chief photographers.

"Joe had a real sense of the moment," recalls Murray. "I'm not saying he was limited to this by any means, but his instincts were of the news photographer, the action photographer. The term paparazzi has fallen into disrepute, because generally, these days it means 'vulture.' But Joe was a paparazzo in the highest sense of the term. He knew exactly when to hit that shutter, and where he needed to be when it was time to hit that shutter. And he was absolutely fearless." He also knew how to work with the subjects, sneaking a joint to David Bowie to keep him talking, or getting a laugh out of a camera-shy Prince. "Joe was a great guy to be on a gig with, because he was incredibly gregarious, incredibly funny."

What were Stevens' downsides? "Joe could be moody, Joe could be temperamental. Joe could suddenly decide he was bored or needed to be elsewhere. He could occasionally fuck off and leave at the drop of a hat. Without wishing to raise the stereotype, I'd say there was major Irish there."

"He knew how to keep quiet, but he would also prowl like a cat," recalls Chris Salewicz. A longtime friend of Stevens' and the best man at his second wedding, Salewicz worked with him through the 70s and 80s. "I can picture him now, in a situation like at parties, Joe in his black leather jacket by a pillar. No flash. He could balance that juxtaposition, you know? On the one hand he'd keep very quiet in an interview, but at the same time his character and personality would bring stuff out of people."

As he left the radical papers behind, Stevens gave up news photography. It wasn't his gig-- which he figured out after covering the fighting in Northern Ireland. "I discovered that I didn't have the makings of a war photographer, because you had to be a combination of crazy, and really, really brave. And I wasn't brave enough. I wasn't the guy that you'd send to jump over bodies to get the pictures."

But shooting rock stars suited him well. "I wasn't intimidated by stardom," he says. "I'd already been around all the bigshots. And I saw that they were just like you and I, no big deal. They just happened to be unbelievable sometimes when they get on stage or make a record. The rest of the time, boring, like the rest of us."

For example: He and a writer interviewed the Jam in Hamburg, and "by that time we had already met the Jam, we'd seen them play in London. We'd already done the interview, and these three guys were the most boring people on the face of the earth. All three of them.

"They wanted to hang out with us! We gave them the shake. We told them, 'Well, you know, we've got some relatives here, you know.' We didn't want to spend an evening with them." And anyway, the writer already had plans to go to a whorehouse that night-- and "they would have been awful in a whorehouse."

Caption: Bryan Ferry in Manchester, England 1974 (c) 2007 Joe Stevens

But the Jam came later. In the early 70s, Stevens worked with Murray, Nick Kent, and other staffers at the NME to shoot everyone who was anyone. If you worked for the NME , you could get Bowie to come to your flat early in the morning for a shoot, or you could go on tour with the Rolling Stones, or head out to the country to shoot "really ethereal, wispy, demure weird people living in the country in their little cottages with their kitty-cats. I did all that stuff."

This is also where we see the classic "Captain Snaps" style: Stevens' photographs are funny. Whoever he's shooting, no matter how famous, will look more candid, or off-kilter, or outright ridiculous.

Sometimes it got him in trouble-- like the "gaucho" photo of Bryan Ferry. "There was a gig in Manchester, England, and he shows up in the dress room with this gaucho outfit. This puffy blouse right out of Seinfeld, and puffy pants sort of like MC Hammer baggy pants, white blouse, and a Gaucho hat on an angle, with a little string around his neck. I said, ‘You're going to wear that on stage?' And he said, 'Yeah, why? Want to take some pictures before we go on?'" The shot looks as bad as it sounds: Ferry, with a smoldering face, dressed in a $10 Zorro costume. It ran on the cover with the headline, "How Gauche Can a Gaucho Get". When that hit the stands, Ferry pulled Stevens' photo passes, and Salewicz recalls that Roxy Music pulled ads from the NME .

"Quite often you don't have a chance to bring yourself into the picture. You just hope that your identity will show up in the photographs. It's a crapshoot. But you need to make the attempt to put your stamp on what you do, whatever it is," says Stevens. "Like I did a [Bruce] Springsteen session backstage at a gig in New York. It was only about nine minutes. But [the photo] looks like a Joe Stevens shot." How so? "Because he looks like he wants to start a fight with me."

Throughout the 70s, Stevens took on a workload that he now calls crazy and unhealthy, and he kept it up when he moved back to the States. He came back in the late 70s, mainly out of boredom: The scene was dying down, while in New York, CBGBs was hopping. He has early shots of the Ramones, a gamin Patti Smith, and Debbie Harry in a bright red dress flashing bright red panties. He was a regular at CBGBs: "Probably the most exciting time in my life, musicwise, being at a live gig, was the opening chords to [Television's] 'Marquee Moon.'"

And he got to know the artists personally. "I had a big crush on Tina Weymouth. To the tune of, when it looked like it wasn't going to work out with she and I, I switched over to her sister. I didn't get very far. There aren't any sluts in the Weymouth family, that's what I established. Because they certainly weren't banging me."

Caption: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols [R] in San Francisco on the final night of the band's 1978 U.S. tour, and final night of the group's existence (c) 2007 Joe Stevens

/ / /

Around here, you have to ask: Why did he leave New York?

Now, Portsmouth isn't the middle of nowhere. We've got a weekly paper and a tight music scene. One of the parks has a flasher. Any way you look at it, the town sees its share of action.

But in this country, only Los Angeles and New York City are cities where anything could happen anytime. These are the places where bigshot rock photographers operate. And in the same way, the subjects of Stevens' photographs don't possess degrees of fame. They're not sidemen or one-hit wonders: They are icons. And they wound up on the walls of a bar in Portsmouth.

In New York in the 80s, Stevens was starting to burn out. He left the NME to be the photo editor of a new monthly version of the New York Rocker -- and the magazine folded after a single issue. Working there, he met his second wife, Susan Cummings, a typesetter-turned-rock journalist and a huge goth music fan. Cummings later got a job at Spin , coming in right after it launched. But as for Stevens, he was "up to here with rock music. I was ready to flip out."

One night, Cummings was out, and he thought he could get a few hours to unwind. "I thought I could sit in a chair and think. And then she comes in with the Jesus and the Mary Chain, the whole band, for a photo shoot and an interview...The next morning I split." He left town, left her with the apartment, and that was that. He wonders now if he could have waited it out and saved the marriage. But after he took off, it was too late. "She was an orphan. Orphans don't forget shit like that."

A friend tipped him off to Portsmouth in 1987. Before he came here, he knew nothing about the place. But he found people who went to bars, drove drunk up off-ramps to the next party, sailed, and lived in houses with back yards. He got in the habit of coming back. Then he started bringing his stuff, and one day, he gave up on New York and came to New Hampshire.

"All I wanted to do was chase skirt and drink. I was a regular at the Press Room, and I just relaxed for a couple years, decompressed." But Stevens was still an on-again, off-again resident-- until Christmas 2001. That December, Stevens, who had quit news because he didn't like the violence, agreed to take shots of the World Trade Center site.

He was contacted by an agent, who said "all she needed was pictures of the equipment that was digging that hole and cleaning that out." He balked, but she begged and threw money at him. "So I acquiesced and I took the gig. And I shot most of the time from the roof of a bank, right into the pit. And it was still smoldering. I couldn't clean my clothes, they stunk something horrible, and my breathing was getting awful. I lost about 13 pounds, drinking like a fucking maniac at a bar nearby.

"And then, Christmas Eve I flipped out. Completely flipped out." He took off and drove back to the Seacoast, and at a Super 8 in Kittery, Maine, he decided to give up drinking, put some weight back on, and "get the stink off, burn all my clothes-- which I did, at the motel." He slowed down, and got his health back. And he's been a local here ever since.

/ / /

Joe Stevens opened the "Ho! Ho! Ho! Photo Show!" on December 16, 2006, with a reception at the Press Room. But it wasn't much of an opening. The place was packed, but with the usual crowd sitting at the tables and at the bar-- no buffet, no big event. The only show was Stevens, talking with a couple of friends at a table next to the wall where his photos were hanging.

He's been showing his work almost exclusively in Portsmouth, and even then, Caffe Kilim had to talk him into doing the first show. But after it went up, he was pleased with the reception. "This sort of explained to the younger crowd who this fucking guy was," says Stevens. "He comes in, he has his coffee, he knows everyone, he yaks away, and then he leaves. And suddenly he's got a show on the wall, and it explains to them just what his life has been."

Al Barr of the Dropkick Murphys, another Portsmouth local, has known Stevens since the early 90s. They met at the Stockpot Restaurant, where Barr washed dishes and Stevens tended bar. Barr hired him to shoot his first band, the Bruisers, and the Dropkick Murphys are one of the few acts he's photographed in recent years. "He came out to see us in Portland [Maine] a couple of years ago, and actually had his camera broken because the crazy mother went into one of our pits to take pictures of us," says Barr. The kids in the pit tossed him like a "sack of potatoes."

Knowing Joe has given Al an in with the older rockers. When the Dropkick Murphys opened for the Sex Pistols' reunion tour in 2003, Barr walked right up to John Lydon-- which he'd been warned against trying-- "and I said to him, 'Hey, Joe Stevens wanted me to say hello to you.' He got this look on his face like, 'Joe Stevens. How is old Joe Stevens doing?'" Lydon told him about the time Stevens was driving him around New York City in a blizzard. Stevens took a photo of Lydon stuck in the snow, shoveling out the car and sticking his tongue out at the camera.

But when Barr would tell a Lydon or a Joe Strummer about where Stevens lives now, they had no idea where he's talking about.

That doesn't bother Stevens. "I get work done in this town," says Stevens. If he'd stayed in Manhattan, he'd be calling his friends and hanging out, and "the book would never get finished." He's talking about his first book of photography. Of course, the book isn't finished, and is now in its 12th year.

Most of his income now comes from his photography collection. When he got his first place here in the 80s, he rented a house with a backyard. But rents are higher now, and today he's in one small room crammed with the boxes and bins that hold his collection. Stevens lives frugally, but he's the first to admit he could be making more money off his negatives. Sometimes he hustles photos to magazines, but he doesn't advertise his pictures online. And he rarely sells prints to the public-- "I go to New York and I don't even think about doing photo shows or selling pictures to the public. I get busy on other things."

A local kid once asked him what he needed in life, and as he told me, his answer went, "Someone to share my lovely experiences and my life and my collection, and my future wealth." So what's the problem? "When it gets down to doing the nasty and I took her back to my lovely place, she'd probably get killed. In the middle of sex she'd hit a box, the box would fall on her, she'd die, her family could sue me for however much."

At his Press Room opening, Stevens sold a handful of photos, for ridiculously cheap prices: They topped out at $350 for the Lennon print, and you could get the Bryan Ferry "gaucho" shot for $150. Now and then someone from the bar came up and asked about a photo, and some men in the corner sang a capella Irish songs, at a mournful tempo like a wake.

Stevens mentioned that a woman he knew back in the day, an executive at Warner Brothers, just showed up in the obituaries. Later, when I spoke with Stevens' ex-colleagues in England, they asked me to pass along word about writers who had passed away-- Tony Tyler, Ian MacDonald. Looking at those photos on the Press Room wall, almost none of them less than 20 years old, I couldn't help thinking that maybe this era's wound down. Rock's done. Punk's done. The new kids can try to make great music, but it's not going to get them on a wall like this.

But the thing that's striking about Stevens isn't the icons he photographed but the lifestyle he led around them-- of hitting the right parties at the right time, knowing how to catch those bursts of genius that put these men and women on the wall in the first place. Stevens calls himself a "bigshot," and that's who he is-- even in Portsmouth. Being a bigshot gave him a front-row seat to the best of what the second half of the century offered. But bigshots can do something the icons can't: When they're tired of it all, they can always just walk away.